Columns

From the category archives: Columns

FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi

Theologians make an important distinction between what they call devotional and liturgical prayer. Devotional prayer, they tell us, is private in nature and is meant to help sustain us personally on the spiritual journey. Liturgical prayer, by contrast, is public by nature, the Church's prayer (not our own), is universal in scope, and is intended for the needs of the world.

FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi

Most of us, I suspect, are familiar with Dan Brown's runaway bestseller, The Da Vinci Code. Here's the storyline: Looking at Leonardo Da Vinci's painting of the Last Supper, Brown proposesthe figure on Jesus' right, the "beloved disciple," is Mary Magdala, who married Jesus, bore him a child and was Jesus' real choice to succeed him as leader. Moreover what she represents (the goddess, the eternal feminine, sexuality) is the Holy Grail,the real quest of every heart. But the official Church, from its beginning to this very day, has suppressed this, often violently, burning to death more than five million women in the process.

FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi

Michael Buckley, the American Jesuit, once did a fascinating study of Jesus and Socrates, comparing them in terms of human excellence. The result? In many aspects, Jesus appears to be the weaker of the two men.

FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi

Rock star, Janis Joplin, was once asked, "What's it like being a pop idol?" Her answer: "It can be awful sometimes. You have no idea how hard it is to go out on stage and make love to 20,000 people and then go home and have to sleep alone!"

FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi

The Church today, at least in the West, it is not a very happy place. Gone are the wonder and the joy of being young, the innocent laughter that so characterizes us when we're still pre-neurotic. There's a middle-aged heaviness to the Church today, a certain sadness. We're grieving a lot of things:

FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi

In the movie, The English Patient, there's a wonderful scene, stunning in its lesson:

A number of people from various countries are thrown together by circumstance in an abandoned villa in post-war Italy. Among them are a young nurse, attending to an English pilot who's been badly burned in an air-crash, and a young Asian man whose job it is to find and defuse land-mines. The young man and the nurse become friends and, one day, he announces he has a special surprise for her.